Celestial Digestion

Before every presentation, my stomach tightens, as if gravity has found me early. I used to think anxiety lived in my head, circling like restless thoughts, but it begins lower—an orbit forming quietly in the gut. When I lie beneath the night sky, the pull shifts. The sky stretches wide enough to hold it. Under the stars, the same gravity that knots my stomach begins to release, as if the body remembers it is part of a larger system: small, but still in motion.

Bathrooms and observatories are built for these moments of pause. One is tiled and echoing, the other domed and infinite, yet both are spaces where gravity feels bearable again. In their stillness, the orbit steadies.

If anxiety is gravity, then perhaps design—of space, of self—is how we learn to orbit more gently. Somewhere between the bathroom and the stars, the universe settles quietly inside us.